Mister WA is kickstarting a new series of cultural explorations with pioneer artists Janet Hamill and Camille O’Grady, presenting a rare blend of poetry, spoken word, music, and performance.

O’Grady and Hamill have been friends and collaborators since they first met in the creatively rich and vibrant NYC that gave us Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, and the Velvet Underground. Poet Janet Hamill is currently on a West Coast teaching tour and will be joining O’Grady’s return to performance at The Beat Museum for one evening only.

Turn on & Tune in to Mister WA’s multi-faceted collusion with SF Underground Arts and Performance on his SF Commons bi-monthly Web-TV Show!

Janet Hamill

Author of seven books of poetry and short fiction: Troublante, The Temple, Nostalgia of the Infinite, Lost Ceilings, Body of Water, Tales from the Eternal Café and Knock, her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize, and Tales from the Eternal Café was named one of the “Best Books of 2014” by Publishers Weekly.

Janet Hamill

Her most recent book, Knock (Spuyten Duyvil Press, Brooklyn, NY, 2016) is a surreal trip book written in the form of 72 pantoums.

In addition to writing, Janet is a strong advocate for the spoken word and has read at Bumbershoot Festival, The Andy Warhol Museum, and many other US and international venues. She performs with the band Lost Ceilings, and together they have released two CD’s of poetry and music: Flying Nowhere and Genie of the Alphabet. She is the founder and co-director of Megaphone, a monthly literary series.

She’s taught at Naropa University and New England College, where she received her MFA.

At present she is a senior artist advisor at the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf, NY where she co-directs Megaphone, a monthly series of workshops, readings and presentations focusing on surrealism’s literary origins, its predecessor and legacy.

Camille O’Grady

At 19, this artist-poet-rocker-medium was described by a famed reader as ‘an artistic science fiction soap opera’ and decades later, this manifesto is still obvious!

Camille O’Grady, photo credit: Glenda Hydler

O’Grady cut her creative teeth in the center of the NYC avant-garde of visual artists, writers, and musicians, starting with the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, and pre-nascent Soho, and went on to a rock-by-way-of-poetry career starting as an early draw at CBGB and a wide swath of clubs, galleries, and reading situations, including St Mark’s. A lifetime activist, particularly in the fields of sex and gender politics, O’Grady created ground-breaking Jack Savage, a male ‘drag persona’ in the early ’70s. She and her cutting edge band toured with Lou Reed on both coasts before her move to the West Coast in ’79, when she became instrumental to the burgeoning art and rock scenes in both LA and SF to this day and pioneered the use of digital and analog electronics with her performance.

Camille O’Grady, photo credit: Mister WA

O’Grady will be reading and singing her very unique mix of spoken and sung word for the first time after a long hiatus. She is marking her return with a review of her wide world of experience, including sex, drugs, rock’n’ roll , art, politics, people, humor and a world of visionary experience fed by a rich and unusual life of exceptional psychic events and revelations.